Buongiorno, mi amici.

Hello from Venice, where the boats are running full and the lines are long. Though, so far the vaporettos actually aren’t quite as crowded and the lines aren’t quite as long as they have been in past years. I’ve heard talk from a colleague or two that attendance is down this year, partly because the lineup isn’t so strong and, maybe, because last year’s once-glittering lineup ended up being sort of a letdown. Or, y’know, there are just fewer journalists than there used to be and the entirety of the global film industry is ailing. Isn’t that cheery?

It all feels a little like the start of Cannes did this year; the movies are underwhelming and the mood is subdued. Not helping matters is that my jet lag decided to show up four days into my trip; “I’ll wait for the movies to start,” it said, descending over me as I sat and watched the festival’s opening-night film, Danny Boyle’s newspaper drama Ink. The film is based on a hit play about Rupert Murdoch and the editor Larry Lamb working to create the first modern tabloid in the UK, a picture of process that Boyle tries to give some modern political relevance. I’m not sure he succeeds on that front, but the let’s-make-some-trash stuff is grimly engaging, as Lamb (Jack O’Connell) tries to turn The Sun into something his Australian benefactor (Guy Pearce) might approve of. 

We watch as Lamb and his hard-partying deputies (plus Claire Foy as a cynical feminist editor) hone storytelling down to its basest forms: sex, sleaze, scandal, and free giveaways. It all seems quite obvious, even quaint, to us now. But in 1969, I suppose it was a real jolt to the status quo. Or at least that’s what Ink pitches to us, rollicking through the early months of the paper’s transformation as it steadily climbs the ranks of popularity, one lurid edition after another. But at some point Boyle has to stop and remind us that, uh, this is Rupert fucking Murdoch we’re talking about here, one of the worst perpetrators of civic evil we’ve got around at the moment. 

I’m not sure he does enough of that—if anything, it’s Lamb who comes across as the real villain, while Murdoch, suddenly afflicted with moral qualms, is made to look on with a little horror at the monster he’s created. It’s not unlike the treatment that the odious Roy Cohn got in The Apprentice, a bad guy made to seem less bad in order to better contrast the film’s central figure. Only in a hokey final montage does Boyle gesture toward all the ills that Murdoch would one day unleash upon the world, though I don’t know that it’s quite fair to conflate Fox News with the arrival of celebrities like Kim Kardashian (who briefly appears in said montage). The argument here is muddled, as is Boyle’s grab-bag of visual tricks. Too often in Ink it feels like Boyle is trying to remember what he did to distinguish himself in the 1990s. “Maybe I moved the camera a lot and shot at skewed angles? Sure, let’s try that.”